ELECTRE TRI-nB: A new multiple criteria ordinal classification method

This paper presents a new method for multiple criteria ordinal classification (sorting) problems. In an ordinal classification problem, the categories (also called classes in related literature) are pre-defined and ordered, from the best to the worst or from the worst to the best. The actions (not necessarily known a priori) are assigned to the different ordered categories. Several ELECTRE type methods were designed to deal with this kind of problem. However, none of them proposes a characterization of the categories through a set of limiting profiles. This is the novelty of the current method, which may be considered as an extension of ELECTRE TRI-B. It fulfills a set of structural requirements: uniqueness of the assignments, independence, monotonicity, homogeneity, conformity, and stability with respect to merging and splitting operations. All these features will be presented in the current paper and illustrated through three examples.